About Me

Friday, January 2, 2009

From inverted V to plain ole W

Last winter, we had an ice storm and trees were covered with a nice layer of ice, well nice to the eye, but not to the tree, power lines etc. Fortunately the damage was minimal as we were lucky enough not to get too thick a layer. I use a Cobra Ultra-Lite antenna for HF and I took a few pictures of the change that occurred with the ice.

What normally is an inverted V shape, was now a plain ole W shape. Having never read about a W shaped antenna, I did not bother checking SWR nor attempted to operate with it in that shape. The counter weights I use to dampen the sway of my supporting trees did its job and the antenna survived the ordeal without problems and is still in use a year later. The picture shows only one leg of the W though. The antenna is 140 feet long, at about 35-40 feet high. It works fine in all bands, with a tuner of course. The internal tuner of my Icom 756ProIII does the job. Difficult to rotate though! It is currently used for 30-160 meters as my Cushcraft MA5B beam is doing a better job on 10-20 meters.